End Of The World movies may be truer than truth as it was presented in the tub analogy in

THE CARBON BATHTUB

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, DECEMBER 2009

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/big-idea/05/carbon-bath

This tub analogy won't hold water. It's too static to account for the accelleration the forces of climate change snergistically exert on each other: loss of Albedo contributes to tundra melt produces methane which produces more carbon and acid, reducing plankton and killing coral, reducing the oceans' & forests' abilty to absorb carbon, changing ocean currents to produce droughts, resulting forest fires pumping more carbon into the atmosphere, and these and more combined effects accellerating the rise in global temperature and accellerating WITH each rise in global temperature. In other words the hotter it gets the faster it can get hotter.

You can figure the tub, as presented, with grade school math but you can't figure climate change feedback loops separately or simply because they multiply by exponents. To make the tub as dynamic as an ecosystem you have to calculate the rate by which sludge builds up in the drain for every extra gallon of carbon and greenhouse gasses dumped in at the tap. Then you have to calculate the rate at which sludge tends to trap more sludge, narrow the drain and produce more greenhouse material at AND, simultaneously, enlarge the tap. I can't do the math on that & I doubt that even internet mainframes could, but that would be the closest approach to the actual situation I can think of.

The proposed political token remedy: reducing our INCREASE in emissions, even with controlling for the effect of population growth, still leaves us with a growing INCREASE in existing greenhouse gasses and carbon and a greater and greater accelleration in, and multiplication of, feedback loops. Also left out of the equation: social feedback loops, how small a disaster it takes to damage a social network to the point of anomie. Chernobyl exhausted the entire world's supply of bone marrow, one Katrina exhausted the EPA's mental and material resources. How could we afford all our far flung wars if we had several Katrinas, Tsunamis and Chernobyls at once?

Even if we somehow reduced existing greenhouse gasses and carbon to pre industrial revolution levels, where is the science and math to figure how low the earth's temperature has to go to stop one, much less thousands of feedback loops? The only possibly effective remedy is to start negative feedback loops, for instance: pv panels on dirigibles in the upper atmosphere or outer space placed and moved around to replace Albedo, i.e. produce shade where needed while simultaneously beaming usable microwave energy back to earth where it's needed, biochar, artificial reefs, and solar pumps filling the Salton Sea for the production of halophytes for biofuel and shrimp farming, smokestack algae biofuels

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0111/p01s03-sten.htmletc

would help. But we have to remember that energy, once used, is also heat. So conservation and population control and use of every form of renewable energy possible have to be part of our system of negative loops.

Some argue that such draconian measures would be dangerous meddling with an already fragile ecosystem, but we have to remember we've been doing that kind of meddling for thousands of years already in the same sense that we've been changing the chemistry of the earth and genetically modifying crops and playing god with our own genetic code and the code of plants and animals. We're just coming to the point where we have to do the same modifications consciously or opt out of and lose out on the life of the mind and the adventure of consciousness entirely. It reminds me of an old fable about someone who eats of the fruit of knowledge and has to leave a beautiful garden. Once having done that, we can't stop eating that fruit. We need to learn how to turn fruit (and water) into wine.